A day before the event, the newspapers announced the declaration of a general strike on 20th and 21st of February, across all of India, including a partial public transport strike, and amidst the major apprehension, QualiTest India got a lot of mails and call asking if the event would be called off. However, we got an equal number of responses saying the strike was not effective and the city was going about business, as usual, and that people were keen to catch Zappers. So we decided to keep the event on.
The turn-out was not as huge as usual; however we had about forty Zappers across five feisty teams, there were two teams from Moolya, one from HP and Collabera each, and a fifth one which was a mix of Independent Testers from various organizations.

The theme of the event was around mobile testing and we had encouraged a BYOD approach. However as standard practice and as hosts of the event, QualiTest India provided one laptop and one tablet per team, for testing and logging in defects. The website we had chosen for testing was https://screenhits.tv , to be tested on smart phones.

The teams were given forty minutes to test the website from Functionality, Usability, Accessibility* and Localisation perspective and as always there were two prizes declared. The main prize for the winning team at Zappers India, is always about USD 200, and is given to the team that can log the maximum number of valid defects in the given time. The other Prize of about USD 100, is for what we call the “Showstopper Bug” prize which usually refers to the most serious and/or difficult to detect defect logged in, by an individual or a team, which if left undetected could lead to a “show stopping” situation for the application and/or business.

Within minutes, the teams were already logging in their first bugs, whilst a team of QualiTest judges scrutinised all the logged defects. At the end of the competition, the “Top team” spot was claimed by the team of Independent testers, for having logged the maximum number of valid defects within the given time slot, proving perhaps that a varied team sometimes does a better job than a very homogeneous one.
Each team then did a brief presentation on why their defect should win the prize for the “Showstopper bug” while the rest of the teams tried to find gaps in their arguments. Finally the team from Collabera was able to prevail in proving that their defect was the most amazing one.

The evening ended with a scrumptious Buffet dinner, and as the guests parted with smiles, the first-timers said they loved the concept of meetups for passionate software testers, and vowed to be back with a better and bigger team next time, while the regulars said they enjoyed themselves and would love to be there for the next Zappers as well.

About Zappers

Zappers is a peer-sharing event and Zappers community members believe in learning from each other and sharing testing knowledge to raise the standard of testing throughout the UK and internationally. More importantly they believe in having a good time doing this and so all events include free food and drinks and are totally free to enter.